1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an organism-specimen morphological-change detecting apparatus and a method for optically detecting morphological change of an organism specimen such as an animal/plant cell.
2. Description of the Related Art
A new drug development in a drug manufacture industry employs a candidate compound screening for selecting a candidate compound as a candidate of a new valuable medication from various compounds. The candidate compounds are artificially synthesized or sampled from natural products, and a number of their kinds is very large. The candidate compound screening comprises steps of administering a compound-containing solution to be screened to an organism specimen such as an animal/plant cell or a microbe, culturing the organism specimen, and observing change and growth speed of the organism specimen after the dosage. When the organism specimen indicates a distinctive change, the compound solved in the solution is judged as a candidate compound. Therefore, possibility of finding the candidate compound depends on the observation of the change or the growth speed of the organism specimen
For observing, for example, sequential changes of a shape, a size, an orientation, and a division state of the cell, and the growth speed of a hypha, work of observation, recording and data-processing of them is required at given time interval. Conventionally, such observation work of the organism specimen entirely relies on a person""s operation. An experimental worker visually observes a cell in a view field of a microscope, data-processes required items focusing on an observed part, and records them.
Such observation work is troublesome and expends much effort and time. The work thus decreases efficiency in the entire experiment and applies an excess load on the experimental worker. Data of measurement result intends to vary depending on observation experience and skill of each experimental worker and hardly ensures reliability.
The present invention addresses the problems discussed above. An organism-specimen morphological-change detecting apparatus in accordance with the present invention comprises a solution administering mechanism for administering a compound-containing solution to an organism specimen, an image taking unit for taking a microscopic image of the organism specimen, and a quantitative evaluation unit for processing the image taken by the image taking unit and outputting numeric data for indicating a state of the organism specimen.
An organism-specimen morphological-change detecting method in accordance with the present invention comprises the following steps:
(a) taking a microscopic images of an organism specimen before a dosage of a compound containing solution;
(b) processing the images taken in step (a), deriving numeric data before the dosage for indicating the state of the organism specimen, and storing the derived numeric data;
(c) taking a microscopic images of the organism specimen at a predetermined interval after the dosage of the solution at the same scaling factor as in step (a); and
(d) processing the images taken in step (c), deriving numeric data after the dosage for indicating the state of the organism specimen, and storing the derived numeric data.